-- TemiAdeniji - 17 Apr 2010

Post-Colonial? Post-Nothing.

In the Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen discusses conspicuous consump¬tion, leisure, and waste, as the ultimate expression of the pecuniary culture. Veblen asserts that the predatory powers, which were highly revered in less developed cultures, manifests itself in today’s society in the concentration of high incomes among few members of the society. The large incomes, however, are useless if they cannot be projected, so we have created for ourselves various mechanisms to permit them to be displayed. Conspicuous consumption, that is the ostentatious extravagance with the articles we purchase, is a means of flaunting these predatory abilities. Our clothes, cars, homes, etc. give a clear indication of our predatory order. Thus, we have produced in our society an operative method of distinguishing between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’

This dichotomy between the leisure class and everybody else provides a certain useful framework for discussing the perils of imperialism. The Scramble for Africa led to the creation of an analogous juxtaposition between the colonizing West (the ‘haves’) and the colonized Africans (the ‘have nots’). Turn to Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Written over half a century ago at the peak of the negritude movement amidst the slew of colonized people agitating for independence, it remains as relevant today as it was then. Cesaire wrote: “Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production. My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thing-ification.’ ” Cesaire’s theory of ‘thingification’ centers on the commodification of the colonized. In other words, the colonizers transformed the oppressed into objects functioning solely to satiate the needs of the colonizer. The “thingification” that Cesaire speaks of is related to the thingification that Veblen speaks of conceptually. In Veblen’s work, the leisure class commodifies items whereas the colonizers did so with the African people. But while Veblen is unwilling to take a position as to the resolution of this culture of conspicuous consumption and the end result of capitalism and private property (and he need not), genuine decolonization depends on the outcome of this inquiry on “thingification.”

How do we fight against “thingification”? To this effect, Cesaire calls for the decolonization of the mind as opposed to simply cursory and superficial political independence. He exhorts: “The relationship between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.” I touched briefly on the failures of the post-colonial Nigerian state in my previous essay, but my analysis of decolonization was limited to the political dominion. In Cesaire’s probe, he is more interested in the lingering effects of colonization on the African psyche. An invocation of Frantz Fanon is quite apt in parsing out this subject. “There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. // There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. // How do we extricate ourselves?” Herein lies the root of the post-colonial identity crisis: whether wrestling off the shackles of colonialism require that Africans to completely denounce everything the West imposed upon us. Does maintaining Western structures implicitly mean that we are emulating the West and trying to prove our worth to them?

Perhaps combating “thingification” requires a disbandment of all social institutions created by the colonizers. Perhaps not. While it may be easy for the outsider to contemplate the dissolution of the nation-state in the African context because after all they are not intrinsically ‘African’ and are remnants of the colonial artifact, it is not so easy for me to accept this proposition. To ask this is to ask Africans to accomplish a feat that even the mighty United States as we know was unable to do. After all, independence in 1776 certainly was not followed by an extrication of everything British. Case in point: the legal system in the United States, albeit markedly different, is not completely devoid of English common law. Nor does it need to be. In my opinion, declaring that the nation-state is in it of itself incompatible with Africans is just as nonsensical as claims that democracy cannot work in Africa. If the people decide they want dissolution, so be it. But Westerners have no place in forcing dissolution down our throats as they forced the artifice itself upon us. One may retort that we have been trying for over fifty years now to make the system work to no avail, but such a proposition would necessitate accepting the assumption that independence was truly commensurate to ‘decolonization.’ In fact, it was not. Many African nations, Nigeria included, are de jure decolonized but still de facto colonized. We have yet to decolonize our minds, as Cesaire advised. But this process will take time, lest we forget the youth of African nations in comparison with the old age and wisdom of the enlightened West.

Veblen’s reluctance to provide any cathartic solution for the reader can be reduced to his failure to quench the reader’s desire for a climax and denouement, leaving a feeling of uneasiness. Decolonization is much the same. We sit in a state of flux, “pontificating” if you will, about what will become of the African state. To conclude, one another reference to Cesaire: “The truth is that I have said something very different: to wit, that the great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about.” So it could be that the edifices themselves are not problematic; rather, the pattern of imposition is what created and continues to perpetuate the dilemma.